Living in coronavirusworld 132: Play ball

8/5

beauty along the way

the Crawfords

Today’s history  lesson for the Underground starts with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Baseball Leagues. Today I wear a shirt and hat from the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and tell the story of Gus Greenlee. Gus made his money in the numbers “racket,” but within the black community, known as one who paid scholarships to send students to colleges and provided money for people to buy homes when denied by banks. He became the owner of the Crawford Grill, Pittsburgh’s equivalent of the Lennox Lounge where the best in black entertainers like Billie Holiday and Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald would perform. (In later years, Martin Luther King,Jr would stop by when he was in town.) Negro league ballplayers would stop by the Crawford as well. Greenlee was incensed to learn that while the famous Homestead Grays could play their games at the Pirates’ Forbes Field, they were not permitted to use the showers. So Greenlee decided to build his own stadium….and his own team. Greenlee Field was the first black built stadium.  It even had lights.  He quickly gathered the best players like Josh Gibson (the Black Babe Ruth), the only man to ever hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium, arguably better than Ruth, the great pitcher Satchel Paige…Soon between the Grays and Crawfords, Pittsburgh was home to the best in baseball of any color. After seven years, a major hit in the numbers business took Greenlee out of baseball.

But there was one more chapter…1n 1954 Branch Rickey took Greenlee on as a partner to create the United Staes Baseball League, essentially a fiction to get a contract with Jackie Robinson and keep him away from anyone else until Rickey could get him into the Dodgers. Greenlee assumed the partnership  would continue after Robinson went to Brooklyn. It did not. For Greenlee, it was back to the Crawford Grill.   Gus Greenlee was but one example of the entrepreneurs who created the Negro League.  People like Effa Manley, first woman to own and direct a team, the Newark Eagles “as important to black Newark as the Dodgers are Brooklyn” she said. Newark would be the team of Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.  As baseball integrated, it meant the end of the Negro Leagues and the dynamic business people who created them.  The best Black ball players would become part of Major League Baseball. But those who built and kept a dynamic and exciting  league together would be lost to baseball.  Integration brought with it loss as well as gain. 

115th street 

We spend some time stalking about conspiracy  theories and how they’re growing on the left as wells right. They seem to be a way to manage a world of pain. 

And we talk about HOPE. Which is truly only HOPE f unseen. I share the Jim Wallis (Sojourners) definition:Hope is continuing to have faith in spite of the evidence and working to make the evidence change. 

A woman is quoted a saying “I would die for Jesus but I would not give up my house!”

after the storm

We also talk about how we are not required to find the solution, but only find that one thing we can do. We talk of mental illness.  Of how “melancholia” was more accepted in the day of Lincoln than depression now. How it was seeing slavery as a call not a political problem that enabled Lincoln to move beyond depression. How Freud said the definite of a good life is non-neurotic love and work.  And we talk of the importance of agency, over transaction. As Freire said, that we might become the subjects of our own history.

The New York City General Assembly commissioners finally meet. I realize how unique my experience of being actively engaged was among us. The rest felt isolated and unsure how to connect. No time to absorb or think.”Just one more ZOOM meeting."We plan our report to Presbytery and continue to recommitted to working on the reconvening of Assembly.

Our Presbyterian Health Educational and Welfare Association will be reaching out to the Black Women and Girls Task Force to seek collaboration. Our Disabilities Concerns network feels that experience of BWaG in the world of disability has not yet  been attended to. We decide to extend an invitation to a new Mental Health Network to join . New stream lined by laws are on their way as the continued rebirth of PHEWA takes place. In the current pandemic and social crisis, the work  has taken on renewed relevance and urgency. It feels good to be part of it, to having helped bring it about.